Tormach and making molds

Hello to all. I have a question to the owners of their tormachs. Do you feel your machines with alibrea cad /sprut cam software, can you produce reverse engineered cad models, into cam models then to g-codes, for the mold making industry? "I belive I described the process correctly". I 've heard alot of good reviews from everyone here, and feel the cnc is a very good package. I just need to ask that question about the software and the accuracy of the mill if it can hold the tight tolerance's to produce molds out of 6061, for R&D and short runs. Excuse my lack of knowledge about the alibrea/sprutcam software, heck I probally aint even spelling it right LOL. I have been using Rhino3 and moved up to Rhino4 and have become pretty efficient at modeling, With plenty of room for improvement LOL. Saw the alibrea cad/sprut cam comes with the total package deal at tormach and had to ask that question to the pros out there.Thanks to all

Not sure about the cadcam software but I have seen the machine running and the one I saw had a custom A axis with an extra A axis on the first A axis so anotherwords Ive seen it as a 5 axis machine and it ran great. Ive done over two mounths of research on all the small cnc mills and the tormach seems to be the best plus the company really cares and sticks behind their product to the extreem that one night I was drilling a person for questions on it for a few hours when I realized they should have been closed a hour ago so I opoligized to this person it turned out that it was the owner. How much better can you get then that. Keep looking online you will find out thaat this machine will do fine.

I have cut several mold cavities out of P-20 with our Tormach. Some pretty hardcore surfaces turned out really nice. One of them ran for about 28 hours straight to finish it.

If you have a mold with super tight tolerances I wouldn't trust is, but for industrial parts or prototype molds to .001" it can cut no problem.

The software you speak of I have no experience with and cant help you there.

I have had a some issues with the machine, but they really do stand behind the product and are VERY knowledgeable about the machine.

What issues have you had?

spindle starting reliability, a limit switch went bad, the other limit switches got gummed up and had to be pulled apart and cleaned. Limit switch repeatability is also a problem with mine, don't home in x and y between parts. I scraped a few expensive ones because the Y kept on changing when homed.

It is now just alarming out at random times for no reason at all, sometime during program, sometime just sitting there, and sometime just when hand jogging around. They suspect it is electrical interference and are sending me something to try and fix that.

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Originally Posted by Chuck Reamer

It is now just alarming out at random times for no reason at all, sometime during program, sometime just sitting there, and sometime just when hand jogging around. They suspect it is electrical interference and are sending me something to try and fix that.

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mine was doing this for a while but it quit. it hasn't done it in a long time and i have no idea what was causing it. tormach suspected it was noise also.

So from the above described issue it sounds like a minor glitch. But all in all, how do you feel about the ability of the machine. Can it hold tolerances down to .001 or is the limits with the noise problem going to always be an issue. I need to keep the tight tolerance' at least down to .001 for 6061 for soft plastic injection, If I get into high pressure plastic injection it may have to be held a little tighter and done into mild steel mold cavity then heat treated. I am getting ready to start up a business "try to bring back some manufacturing jobs back home" I dont need a $100,000. cnc nor can I afford something like that right now, just getting thing started and the tormach seemed to be a good cnc to start with for R&D and short runs. Thanks for any help

rossrods, for what you are trying to do it should work fine. We are a start up shop also and it was worth the investment. For the first 6 months it ran fine, just now the noise problem is a real pain.

I cavity out 4140 HTSR and pre hard P-20 a lot with little problems. In aluminium you are limited by your RPM.

Ok yes this machine will hold .001 I have been experimenting this weekend and it will do that no problem it all depends on your programming as far as the noise problems I am hearing do you have the machine in an enclosure? I built an enclosure for mine so the computer is seperate from the machine about 4 ft away and the machine has an sheild around it 3 ft tall. The stand that I built is super solid so all in all everything is so solid that its very quiet very. I believe that it is importante to keep the computer away from the machine and cables as much as possible. Maybe this noise problem is more of a cable or connector?

Tormach sent me a little ferrite thing to clamp around the cable from the PC to the mill, and it seems to be working really well so far. About a day and a half and no alarms yet.

I have my fingers crossed.